HUMAN NATURE

Blair Kamin, Tribune Architecture CriticCHICAGO TRIBUNE

A superb site, a forward-looking client, a gifted designer-all the elements are in place for the proposed new quarters of the Chicago Academy of Sciences to be a powerful architectural presence and a sensitive addition to the landscape. Now, if legitimate urban planning concerns can be met and funds can be raised for the $14 million facility, Chicago's Lincoln Park could be the home of an extraordinary science showcase.

The 137-year-old academy, which focuses on the natural history of the Great Lakes and the Midwest, is the city's oldest museum. It has been housed since 1893 in a handsome neo-classical structure, the Matthew Laflin Memorial Building, at 2001 N. Clark St. Outside, the building is a grande dame. Inside, it's a dinosaur, back in the Stone Age functionally and dark as a cave besides-the kind of place you went on your 5th-grade class trip, clutching a brown paper bag with a soggy tuna-fish sandwich inside.

What is so bizarre about this otherwise gracious structure, which sits at the western edge of Lincoln Park and whose arched windows were filled in with limestone decades ago to create a controlled exhibition environment, is the way it is about nature, but completely closed off from the landscape around it.

The new building, which would be a few blocks north of the present one at the northwest corner of Fullerton Parkway and Cannon Drive, would be an entirely different experience-boldly modern, not quaintly old-fashioned; its roofs opening like wings to a sloping, tree-filled site and the park's North Pond, making nature's presence palpable.

As academy President Paul Heltne suggests, "You can observe outside what is explained inside." Visitors also would be able to bask in the sun on rooftop terraces or walk on a long, narrow balcony projecting into the treetops, like the "Birdwalk" that juts outward from Frank Lloyd Wright's Taliesin house in Wisconsin.

In fact, though the design of the museum remains in the conceptual stage, it holds out the promise of being reminiscent of Wright-anchored in the landscape, yet floating above it-while driving the art of architecture forward. But that is getting ahead of the story.

Before there can be poetry-courtesy of the designer, Ralph Johnson of the Chicago-based architecture firm of Perkins & Will-a number of nitty-gritty issues must be addressed. They include, but are not limited to, the prospect of worsening traffic congestion on Fullerton and the impact the proposed museum will have on the environment of Lincoln Park. The Chicago Plan Commission is sure to take up these concerns when it considers the proposal on Thursday.

The plan's effect on the park appears to be positive. The new academy would cover 20 percent less ground than the current occupant of the site, a nearly abandoned storehouse-maintenance complex of the Chicago Park District known as the North Shops. The proposal also would enable the Lincoln Park Zoological Society to move its headquarters to the Laflin Building, preventing the society from constructing an office building on parkland. Additionally, the museum's roofline would be no higher than the surrounding treeline, and all of the site's 250 trees would be retained.

Johnson's design would create a striking gateway to the park from Lake Shore Drive, a "front-door" building in contrast to the "back-door" North Shops. Motorists on the Drive would be able to glimpse the museum's dramatic profile, with its see-through lobby revealing the pond. Still, the four-story structure (with one of those stories below ground) would be of relatively modest scale, enhancing, not overwhelming, nature.

Yet Lincoln Park will have won a hollow victory if its new green space is shrouded in scenes of honking cars and clouds of exhaust. Fullerton already is one of the city's most troublesome thoroughfares on summer weekends, when thousands of drivers head to the park and the lakefront. The museum could make that mess even worse. And it would be a bitter irony if on weekdays Johnson's architectural jewel were hidden behind a great wall of yellow school buses.

So neighbors, advocacy groups such as Friends of the Parks, and Ald. Charles Bernardini (43rd) are correct to ask, in effect, "Right building, wrong place?" Bernardini wants the prime movers behind the plan-the academy, the Zoological Society and the Park District-to pay for a traffic study. Friends of the Parks, which supports the plan in concept, has floated proposals that would encourage visitors to take mass transit to the museum rather than driving their cars. Neighbors want to know, among other things, whether they will be spending more time than ever in search of a place to park.

While the substance of the discussion is important, so is its tone. It has not yet degenerated into a not-in-my-back-yard shouting match in which constructive compromise is impossible. So compromise should be the order of the day, as long as the plan serves the most important interest at stake-Lincoln Park, which is, and must remain, one of the city's great treasures.

The academy, the Zoological Society and the Park District should seriously address the concerns of the neighbors and Friends of the Parks. But those actors need to keep in mind that too much time spent on a planning process could cripple the museum.

The academy, after all, could be without a permanent home for a year or more, turning over the Laflin Building to the Zoological Society this summer, but not moving into its new home until at least the summer of 1996. If the museum is in a temporary space for too long, it would run the risk not only of losing its audience, but also the fundraising momentum essential to its continued well-being.

The city should be part of any solution, sharing the financial burden of a study that would examine traffic congestion and related impacts of the proposal. Congestion on Fullerton, after all, is a city planning problem. It does not begin and end with the academy.

Give the museum this much: In selecting Johnson, whose award-winning portfolio includes the International Terminal at O'Hare International Airport and the Morton International Building at 100 N. Riverside Plaza, it has decisively declared its intention to build a progressive work of design. Johnson has consistently managed to strike a balance between an architecture that is forthrightly modern and respectful of its surroundings.

It cannot be denied that he ran into trouble on the International Terminal. Perkins & Will recently reached a settlement with the City of Chicago, which alleged design errors that caused millions of dollars in cost overruns at the terminal. But the critically acclaimed project won three design awards from the Chicago chapter of the American Institute of Architects, and Johnson's reputation remains unsullied.

For the museum, Johnson has eschewed the easy solution of mimicking existing buildings in the park, such as the popular Prairie Style of Cafe Brauer or the Laflin Building's neo-classicism. Instead, he takes his cues from nature, slanting the museum on a diagonal to follow the shoreline of the North Pond and to avoid disturbing trees on the site.

The museum's two pavilions-a long one containing exhibition spaces to the north and a short one housing museum offices, a restaurant and other public facilities to the south-would be joined by a glassy lobby, perhaps 60 feet tall. The raking rooflines of the pavilions would convey an image of dynamism, just the right signal to send to elementary school kids who might think of the natural sciences as stuffy and boring. To adults, the building might suggest a bird or a jetliner. Either way, the message would be the same: scientific brainpower, ready for takeoff.

Yet don't expect the building to look as if it just taxied in from O'Hare. Ever sensitive to context, Johnson has looked across Fullerton to the Lincoln Park Zoo Rookery, Alfred Caldwell's Zen-meets-Prairie landscape of stratified stonework, native plants and a wooden pavilion. Johnson's current plans call for his pavilions to be rooted in the landscape with walls of fieldstone, recalling the Zoo Rookery and tempering the building's boldness with familiarity.

Successfully synthesized, the combination of modernism and the Prairie Style would evoke Wright, who set a standard for this design when he wrote: "The good building makes the landscape more beautiful than it was before the building was built."

That's a lot to ask for, of course, and at this early stage, it's worth issuing an obligatory cautionary note: The project's aesthetic success ultimately will depend on how these concepts are realized in detail. That observation also applies to the museum's interior, where Johnson will face additional challenges.

Will he be able to make the museum's two levels of exhibition space seem grand, but not intimidating to children? How will he incorporate the museum's beloved, but aging, natural history dioramas into a modern scheme with interactive exhibits? Will Johnson be able to pull off the idea of a cutaway, underground exhibit that explains the history of the landscape beneath the building?

One hopes so. Cannon Drive, just east of the site, once formed the shoreline of what is now Lincoln Park. The natural history museum would sit on what was, thousands of years ago, a ridge of sand dunes-a wonderful, perhaps auspicious, coincidence that graphically illustrates the beauty of this plan.

A fundamental mission of the academy is promoting scientific literacy; citizens need to understand science and its impact on their lives if they are to fully participate in a democratic society. What better way to open people's eyes to science than an eye-catching, mind-expanding work of architecture? Let us hope that politics does not render it extinct before it's even hatched.